


I want your drama

by Neurocrat



Category: Mr. Robot (TV)
Genre: (again - from Red Wheelbarrow plot nothing new), (i.e. Plot elements from Red Wheelbarrow), Animal Death, Canon Trans Character, Dissociative Identity Disorder, F/M, Hand Jobs, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Implied/Referenced Violence, Kissing, Oral Sex, Prison, white knight complex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-27
Updated: 2017-01-27
Packaged: 2018-09-20 05:01:37
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,455
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9476789
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Neurocrat/pseuds/Neurocrat
Summary: The tale of Carla and Elliot, from Carla's perspective.





	

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote a different Elliot/Carla story a couple months ago, but then I read Red Wheelbarrow and found out that, in canon, Elliot is *so* obviously in love with Carla. Red Wheelbarrow is pretty much all about Carla. But she deserves a little more than what she got in that book, which is all her fitting into Elliot's little drama. Plus I totally think they got it on. 
> 
> NOTE! I am cis writing from a trans character's perspective here, so if I said something stupid or put my foot in it in any way - please let me know!
> 
> ALSO NOTE - Red Wheelbarrow spoilers, if you care.

I knew I should stay away from him, or more to the point, he should stay the fuck away from me. I really didn’t need a little lost boy like him following me around. Getting involved with him was going to be no good for either of us in the long run.

I was really pissed off at first that he kept watching me and following me around like a shadow. On top of everything else I had to deal with, now I’d got a stalker, too? It wasn’t like I was scared of him physically – I mean, I figured I could take his twink little ass if I had to – but he was clearly some kind of psycho, so I didn’t know what to expect from him.

So I confronted him. I told him in no uncertain terms to leave me the fuck alone. I really did mean it, too. The problem was just that he was so fucking cute. I tried to stay harsh on him, but my heart melted a little bit when he just owned it and apologized for being a creep. Then he said he wanted to help me out with Santos and those fuckheads. And when I reasonably pointed out that that was lunacy, and he just did his sad little shrug. I couldn’t help it – he made me wet.

Next thing I knew, he helped get the shit beat out of Santos by Ralph. While logic told me this was insanity, and he was riding an express train to being a bloodstain on the floor, some dumb romantic part of me really liked his pathetic attempt to be my knight in shining armor. You know, all us girls watched too many of those Disney princess movies as kids. We can’t help being affected by that stuff on some deep animal level. Okay, for me maybe it was more Don Quixote, but whatever – even more applicable to this weirdo. 

Anyway, I knew he was going to get himself killed, and the best thing for me to do would be to have nothing to do with him. But there I was, recommending books to him, giving him cigarettes. Pretty soon he knows about my secret rat friend, Reynaldo – not that I would have told him on my own; he interrogated me about the bread I was smuggling, but still – I could have told him to fuck off, I could have hit him again. But it felt so good to trust somebody. One psycho twink was better than nothing. 

And pretty soon I’m telling him my life story. The worst part: he was really interested and sympathetic. At that point, I think in my head I just stopped resisting. I just fucking gave up. I wasn’t in the best place right then (ha ha, literally) and it had been a long time since anyone treated me nice. And here’s this guy, skinny as shit but stupidly good-looking, being all sweet and sensitive with me and wanting to know everything about me. Wanting (in his screwed-up white-knight death-wish way) to protect me from harm. What could I do in the face of that?

Elliot – _god._ Fucking Elliot.

Of course I couldn’t help thinking dirty thoughts about him. I wondered, did he even know what he was getting into with me? I doubted he had ever been with a trans girl before; he seemed pretty naïve. Every time I pictured us together, the scene in my mind would end with some horrible Crying Game shit. Bottom surgery is expensive, and I don’t exactly come from money. I wasn’t very optimistic on how he would react to that, especially going on past experience.

I had no idea what he wanted or what he was expecting. Or if he even thought about me that way at all. Sometimes it seemed like in his head it was some kind of pure and courtly love, like he was a Lancelot type. I reasoned to myself that I should not be disappointed about that. Getting it on with this guy would be a bad idea for so many reasons.

One day, though, he did pretty much admit he thought I was hot. In the context of talking about my jailhouse moniker. I might have thought about that a little too much over the next couple of days, like as in times I was alone. 

Meanwhile, he was fucking with Santos and his crew more and more. Getting himself beat – and finally, getting me beat, too. Not really my favorite method of foreplay, I gotta say. I couldn’t believe how stupid he was being. It was like if Romeo and Juliet, instead of belonging to separate warring clans, were just a couple of outcast losers all on their own that both the warring clans hated and wanted dead. And Romeo is just like, “I’m going to poke that bear with a stick,” like an idiot.

That first time, Kevin and his people kind of rescued him, so he wasn’t a bloodstain on the floor just yet. But I knew Kevin wouldn’t always be around. For whatever reason, Leon was his close buddy, I knew that. I liked Leon, I knew he was a good ally. Nobody messed with him. But as far as I could tell, Leon didn’t have any crew at all. I didn’t know what his deal was.

What happened to me, though – well, that was a pretty strongly-worded warning from the universe to stay away from Elliot. Don’t talk to him, don’t touch him, for Christ’s sake don’t fuck him. Did I listen to that sage advice? Of course not. Who ever listens to the universe’s warnings?

He visited me in the infirmary. He was shy reaching out to hold my hand, with his own busted-up hand. I hated him for being so sweet. After all, he was the one who started all this, who got them to come after me. He fucking sucker-punched Santos. What did he even think he was doing? I tried giving him the cold shoulder, but he was not so easily dissuaded. As he kept visiting me, I finally refused to speak with him. _This is for your own good, too,_ I thought at him, angrily. 

So what does he do? He writes me a fucking romantic poem.

I didn’t really know what to make of it. It was so funny how he asked me not to read it until he left, like a teenager. I wanted to laugh at him and also kiss him. I can’t say it was the _best_ poem I’ve ever read, but to be fair, I’ve read a lot of good poems. It reminded me a lot of something, actually, that I couldn’t quite place – something famous by someone important I read a long time ago. Anyway, it had imagery of women being like flowers, and, man, was it clear to me he had a bad case of the white-knight bullshit. Still, there was something nice about being someone’s distressed damsel. I mean, so many people won’t even see me as a girl. Whereas for Elliot, it was so automatic that he’d already slotted me into his quixotic fantasy story. I won’t lie, it fed my soul.

I went to see him in his cell after I was released from the infirmary. I tried to tell him what the poem meant to me, which wasn’t easy for me, let me tell you. But he cut me off, almost like he knew what I was going to say and it made him too angry or sad. Or maybe he was just too embarrassed. He had this look on his face like he was really angry at himself. I watched him, curious. More and more, I wondered what his deal was. I mean, obviously he was crazy, but what kind, exactly? What had happened to him to make him this way? 

I tried to sort of reach out to him, that day in his cell. I said something to the effect of: Hey, if you ever want to talk or whatever. Except probably not even that coherent - I’m not real good at being a supportive friend. Or at flirting, which was the other thing I was kind of lamely trying to do. I mean, he gave me a love poem, basically; I tried to let him know it was alright. To not be embarrassed, because, well, I liked it. I sort of stuttered on like that for a little bit, just making more and more of an ass of myself because he was basically not responding at all. He wouldn’t even look at me. Finally he sort of mumbled that it was time for lunch, and got up to leave.

Something in me snapped right then. I had put up with a lot of stupid bullshit from him, but I wasn’t going to let him get away with this. He writes me a poem, gets all embarrassed and weird over it, and I confess to him I like it, and he just gets up and walks away? Nuh-uh, boy, sorry. I sprung up and grabbed him right outside his cell, pinning him back to the wall like the first time I’d confronted him. But this time, touching him felt, well, different. I breathed out a little with the shock of it, and he looked up at me, finally. His eyes were wide and his mouth open, surprised and a little afraid, but he didn’t pull away when I loosened my grip on him. “Elliot,” I said to him, running my hands over his shoulders tentatively. He reached up to grip my wrists and I froze at first, thinking this was not what he wanted, he didn’t want me touching him. But he closed his eyes and tilted his head back against the wall, doing this sort of shudder of pleasure. I don’t have to describe to you how that affected me. 

I caressed his shoulders where he was holding my hands, murmuring to him, dumb stuff I couldn’t help: “Elliot – look – I like you – I really… The poem was… I don’t know if… Do you want me?” His breathing picked up at that. He opened his eyes to look at me again, and swallowed nervously and licked his lips (like he was remembering that he was supposed to be the knight, and I was the damsel, dammit) before leaning forward to kiss me, taking my head in his hands.

God, his mouth felt good. We were all over each other immediately. Tongues happened, and he was cool with it. His body under my hands - yeah, he was super skinny, like almost as skinny as me, but I didn’t care, he felt great. He was caressing up and down my back while we kissed, kind of awkwardly but that’s what I would expect from him anyway. So long as he was touching me.

We broke apart after a couple of seconds, panting, because someone would see us soon, and we both knew we couldn’t really do this, especially not right now. (Both our bodies already bore the wreckage of the consequences of us hanging out together.) Elliot was looking around almost wildly while I wiped my mouth on my arm. Like there was something even beyond Santos and guards and everything else to be afraid of. He looked at me one more time, mumbled “sorry” (what the fuck?), and practically ran off to the cafeteria. I stayed behind for a minute so we wouldn’t be seen together.

***

That was the last time we touched for a while. It was not a good time to start up anything. I was looking over my shoulder for Santos & co. every second. The more time I spent with Elliot, the more hurt I was going to bring down on myself.

So I was good, I stayed away from him for a while.

I laid low in general, and I didn’t really take note of the extra looks and muttering I was getting. I thought it was just the usual bullshit plus how messed up I looked from what those assholes did to me. I had all this anxiety swimming around in me, waiting for the next thing that was coming. 

When it did, it was not what I expected at all. Fucking Carlos yelling in front of everyone that I was diseased, blaming me for him having caught something. Jesus. All these people standing around, staring. It was like one of those nightmares you have about being naked. I just stood there like an idiot saying I didn’t have anything, as if that was the problem, not that he and his scum friends fucking raped me. Things just got worse from there when Elliot showed up in white-knight mode. Of course Santos knocked him to the floor. Leon came over to comfort me, which I thought was nice at first, but then he had the gall to try to get me to make nice with Elliot, to get me to see that what Elliot’d done was good for me. I finally put two and two together, and I couldn’t fucking take it anymore, I was so mad. I just walked away from both of them.

I had to hide in the commissary to keep Elliot off my case. He was a hard one to shake, I had to give him that. All this time I was furious with him and never wanted to talk to him again, I also missed him; I couldn’t help it. It was maddening and also kind of sweet how he so badly wanted to track me down. Pretty much like how he always was. Maddening, and also kind of sweet.

I couldn’t avoid him forever. I mean, we were in a prison. There are only so many places to go. Eventually I started hanging out with him and Leon again at meals. Elliot looked relieved, like I wasn’t mad at him anymore and it was all over. But I wasn’t going to let it all go that easy – I had to explain to Elliot exactly why what he had done was not okay. I actually took a little time to think it through, what exactly I was going to say to him, how I was going to make my argument. When I was ready, I found a moment out in the yard to take him under the bleachers, and I explained. How self-centered it was of him to take control of someone else’s life like that. To make such a big decision for me, on my behalf. The way he didn’t even talk to me about it first.

He was kind of stunned, so I just left him there to mull that over.

I never got a direct apology from him, but at least I’d said my piece, and that made me feel a little better. Things kind of returned to normal between us. Talking about books. Making fun of each other’s tastes in TV shows (I would not have pegged him as such a defender of Seinfeld, truly.)

One day, we took a walk around the yard. It was almost sort of romantic. We actually talked about what we were in for, something you don’t really ask someone usually, but I felt like once a person has spread a rumor around the whole block that you’ve got horrible STDs, well, some of those barriers have come down, right? He just told me “hacking”. It made a lot of sense; he was just that kind of weirdo. I had this thought right then, what if he had something to do with five/nine? And I asked him. Even while I was asking, I thought that idea was kind of crazy, what are the chances I’d end up in the same prison block as one of those guys, a famous international hacker criminal? But the way he slipped around my question actually did make me kind of wonder.

He asked me what I was in for, and I told him. No matter how stupid it was for me to do, no matter that it landed my ass in jail, I will always remember that fire and I will never regret it. The biggest one I’ve ever set, probably the biggest one I ever will set. My masterpiece, my magnum opus. No matter how bad things got in there, I could always picture the beautiful tableau of all those cars blowing up in giant fireballs. With my name mentally signed in the corner of the canvas, so to speak. They can never take that away from me.

Even just telling him about it filled me with such a rush, my fingers and toes were tingling and I was smiling uncontrollably, like I was on drugs. He asked me why I liked fire so much, and I couldn’t really explain it to him and didn’t want to try – why should I, anyway, when he wouldn’t tell me anything about his hacking? Still, I felt closer to him just from having told my story, and having learned what little about him he was willing to share. Re-living my 12-car fire had put me in a good mood, an electric mood. We were far enough away from everybody in the yard, so I took his hand and held onto it as we walked. That made him get real quiet.

Feeling his hand made me think of the poem he’d written me, and our aborted make-out session outside his cell, what had it been – maybe four days earlier, although it felt like weeks with everything that had happened in between. We’d never talked about it, there hadn’t really been a chance. But here was one, the two of us walking alone in the yard, out of earshot from everybody.

“So, the other day, when we kissed and stuff,” I said all of a sudden. I’m not one to beat around the bush. “What’s the deal with that, I mean, on your end?”

He dropped my hand immediately. “That was a mistake,” he said quietly.

My high mood melted away. “What?”

“I didn’t mean to do that,” he said, “I’m sorry.” Once again, the prick was acting like the universe revolved around him, that he was in charge of everything – like it hadn’t been me who chased him into the hallway and pinned him against the wall.

“What are you talking about – you gave me every indication we were on the same page,” I said to him. “I told you I liked you. I asked you if you _wanted_ me! Just in case you thought I meant just as a friend!”

We had stopped walking. I was facing him, but he wouldn’t meet my eye.

“I wanted to kiss you, Elliot. That wasn’t some fucking mistake you made. If you think it was a mistake, at least admit it was one we made together.”

He wouldn’t answer me. He just stood there looking uncomfortable.

“Well? Come on, fucking say something,” I said, raising my voice, his silence pulling more noise out of me.

He took a deep breath and let his eyes just barely skim over mine before looking out into the distance again. “I… I’m not looking for a girlfriend right now,” he said to me. “I’m sorry.” He scuffed the ground with his shoe.

I gritted my teeth to keep from screaming at him. “Then why,” I breathed, trying to keep my voice down, “did you write me a fucking love poem?”

He looked up at me with a shocked expression, and I swear he blushed. Ha! Caught red-handed, motherfucker, how are you going to escape that logic?

“It wasn’t a – I was – that was a self-help exercise, mainly,” he stuttered with a lame laugh.

That was it. I was too angry to take anymore. I turned and literally ran away from him. I didn’t want to even see his face for the rest of the day.

That was the thing, and I’d seen it happen so many times, which is why I had no patience for it: He wouldn’t take responsibility. He was the one who had been stalking me. He was the one who pulled all these stunts with Santos, playing his little white-knight games with me. Drawing me out of my shell, little by little. And then, right when I’ve been softened up enough that I decide to play along, he gets to hide behind excuses, be all like “Oh no you misunderstood, I’m not into you.” What-fucking-ever. 

That was a love poem. I didn’t care what he said.

He was so full of himself, so sure he got to write the story, and have me in it as much as he liked while keeping me out of it when it got too heavy for him to handle. 

And to top it all off, he would not let me in. By this point I’d told him about my abusive fuckhead dad. About running away. Where my name came from. He knew about Reynaldo. And he knew about the crime that got me put away.

What did I know about him? That he was a hacker. If that was even true.

All that was what motivated me to steal his journal. 

***

He was easy to evade. I hid the journal and I hid myself. Well, before I hid the journal, I snuck away to the commissary to read it. I had no moral compunctions about that at that point, especially when he’d admitted he wrote about me in there. But the first page kind of stopped me short. There was a war between two voices going on, and they were both pretty clearly him. It didn’t look faked (although with him, who knew.) I was looking at a very real possibility that I was dealing with someone sicker than I had even thought, someone with multiple personalities.

Which personality had I even been interacting with? Different ones at different times? 

I closed the journal and took a deep breath. I felt a little sorry for him then, and sorry I had stolen the journal when it was possibly the only thing tethering Elliot to some semblance of sanity. I stashed it away in the library and went to do some thinking. 

Before I could get around to finding him and giving it back, he pulled his own little prank on me, getting the guards to find me by hinting I was suicidal – very cute, neat trick, and all-too-easy for people like the guards to believe about somebody like me. They held me up for a while, which only delayed Elliot getting his journal back. But at that point, I was still thinking he did it more out of revenge. When I finally got free of them, I went straight to him to tell him off again. I stopped up short when I saw him, though. He didn’t look good at all. He was all pale and sweaty, deeper rings around his eyes than usual. He actually shoved me by the shoulders, demanding to know where the journal was, his voice sounding all wound up and shaky. He looked like he was having a meltdown. I bit down my anger, because I knew a little more about how exactly he was psycho now, and I really didn’t wish this much of a freak-out on him. I led him to the journal. 

He was going to run off with it right away when I called after him that I didn’t read it, not after the first page. That got him to stop and listen. I told him the reasons why I’d taken it, and I apologized, but I also told him this whole thing between us was over, more or less. Lovers, friends, whatever we were, we had to be honest with each other. That included being honest about shit like love poems friends happened to have written for other friends. I was done with his bullshit, and I told him that flat-out.

He threw that back in my face the next day in a low moment for me. Yeah, we were fighting, kind of, and I hadn’t said the nicest things either, but he said he didn’t have to care about my feelings anymore if we weren’t friends. That hurt.

***

I stayed away from him for a while. Again. Or tried to. He didn’t look good the next couple days. That pale, sweaty look continued. He didn’t look like he was getting any sleep, or much to eat. Then he started wearing that weird bandage around his head. Of course at the time I had no idea what that was all about. But I knew he’d gone downhill. I worried that my stealing his journal stunt was what finally made him snap. That was ridiculous, I knew; this was a person with a whole lot of reasons to snap, and nothing I did could have been that important to him – he told me as much, after all. But I still felt kind of guilty.

I started to watch him more closely. As angry as I had been, as justified as I was in it, I still cared about him. I wanted to know he was okay. I even went to that stupid church group one day, telling myself I wanted a good (internal) laugh at the Jesus freaks, but deep down I knew it was to keep an eye on him.

Then, out of the blue, he gave me his journal to read. Like he all of a sudden decided to let me in his head, after all. I was not expecting that. On the other hand, maybe I should have, just because it was becoming more and more clear that he was one of those guys who had to keep you guessing. They come on all strong, and if you decide, sure why not, then they’re all like, “No no no I just like you as a friend!”. Right? And then you go, alright, and keep your distance, and then suddenly they are up in your face again. I know how this story goes. It’s just another way dudes bend the rules so they get to keep control of the narrative.

The journal, though. I read it all in a night and a day, not as fast as I could have. I had to read certain parts over and over, linger over some of his words. 

Elliot. Crazy fucked-up fucking Elliot. Reading the journal, I started to have some inkling why his behavior was always so erratic, why he did such insanely stupid shit like cold-clock Santos. Two Elliots in there. Or, well, Elliot and someone else he didn’t even want to name. The shit that this other-him put him through, too. The head bandages suddenly made sense. Jesus. Visions of his brains on the wall, of dripping blood. What he’d been putting up with, and nobody had any idea. He hadn’t even told his therapist yet. But he was telling me.

I found out more about his hacking. About his burning need to know where Tyrell Wellick was. Some pieces started to fall into place about that. I started to suspect that, yes, he did have some role in the five/nine hack, he must have. Could he have been more than just some lackey of a lackey of a lackey of Tyrell Wellick’s? How could someone as, well, mental as him have really done anything important in that massive take-down of the Man?

He wrote about me in the journal, of course. And in some ways it was just more of a mind-fuck than ever. Because on the one hand, his journal made it clear that he was totally fucking obsessed with me. He wrote about me constantly. He pondered our conversations. He even plotted with Leon to get me my hormones. (So considerate, but so not getting the message of, run it by me first before trying some hare-brained scheme to help me, would you?). His world practically revolved around me, at least some of the time – when he wasn’t fighting with he-who-must-not-be-named, who-shoots-you-in-the-head-for-fun. Fuck, some of their fights were _about_ me.

But on the other hand, he did not write about our make-out session. He just conveniently left that part out. And he seriously fucking told himself writing that poem for me was a self-help exercise, although he also was super embarrassed and reticent about it. That was _some_ denial. I  knew he felt things for me, but he was too chickenshit to even to admit it to his own journal.

I rationalized to myself that, hey, when you’re in prison you’ve got to find some kind of hobby, so lots of people get obsessed with something – like Leon with his TV shows. And like Elliot clearly also was with that Tyrell character. So maybe I was just Elliot’s Seinfeld, so to speak. Of course it hurt, to think about it that way.

Still. He trusted me with his secrets. That alone made my heart flip in my chest.

I gave it back to him the next evening, meeting him in his cell again. I had so much going on in my head, I didn’t even know where to start – sympathy over what he was going through; guilt for having been so harsh on him; gratitude that he had shared his personal stuff with me when it scared him so much; annoyance still at his refusal to realize who I was to him. More than annoyance. Hurt.

Neither of us knew what to say at first, both sitting cross-legged on the floor, him sort of hugging the journal against his chest and not meeting my eye. Finally, I reached out and gently touched the bandage he’d wrapped around his forehead. He looked up at me.

“I kind of get it now,” I said quietly to him, “I… I know how you feel.” 

We looked at each other a second. His eyes were rimmed with red. Then, so slow, like it made something in him hurt to do it, he reached out and put his arms around me. I hugged him back, and he scooted closer and buried his face in my shoulder. He might have been crying but did a decent job hiding it. I patted his back comfortingly, and I tried to ignore how hot it was making me to touch him, my stupid attraction to him flaring up bad. He needed a supportive friend right now. He needed mothering, he needed - I don’t know, psychiatric meds or something. What he definitely didn’t need was me macking on him. _Be good, Carla. For fuck’s sake!_ I bit my lip and just dealt with it. 

And I would have been fine, I’ve got plenty of willpower, but it was Elliot whose hands started moving in a different way on my back, who pulled his face back to kiss me, who put his tongue in my mouth, who moaned like a desperate virgin. Let the record show that it was not my fucking fault. Maybe _I_ had a good enough head on my shoulders to know sex might be a bad idea for someone with dissociative identities in the middle of a meltdown – but _he_ sure didn’t. 

I looked around, and nobody was coming by, for now. “Here, c’mon,” I said, and we moved to his cot and laid there on our sides, making out. He wasn’t real graceful, a lot of knees and elbows and teeth, but it was kind of sweet, like we were dumb teenagers. I slowly unwound the bandage from his head, and he let me. After running his fingers through my hair again and again, he moved his hands around in front finally and over my chest, and asked me breathlessly, “is this okay?” I wanted to say something sarcastic, but I took pity on him and just smiled and nodded. He made a sexed-out noise in his throat, touching me there, and it felt so good on so many levels, that he liked my breasts so much. 

He turned me onto my back then, sliding on top of me, and I felt how hard he was against my thigh. Of course, he also felt how hard I was. He froze and blinked at me, eyes wide. He looked like such an innocent shy thing, blushing over accidentally touching his first-ever cock (from what it looked like, anyway), that I just laughed out loud instead of being offended. And anyway, he didn’t swear or scramble off of me. He just slowly started kissing me again, holding himself up with one hand and caressing the side of my face with the other. He looked at me in between kisses, and I could see him trying to form questions. 

I sighed. “It’s not what I’d most like to have, no,” I said with annoyed patience. “But I can’t afford to get rid of it yet.” 

Elliot drew his eyebrows together and shook his head a little, making this face like he felt bad I even had to say that. “No, Carla – please, don’t worry like that,” he said. “It’s –“ but he didn’t get to finish that thought, because we heard footsteps coming down the hall. They don’t give you a fuck-ton of privacy in prison: you can see right into the cells from the hallway, of course. So we quickly got up off the bed and stood up. He looked at me and started a question: “Where…?” I took his hand and pulled him out into the hallway, dropping it once we were out there, walking with my hands hanging lamely at my sides – stupid jumpsuits with no pockets. He followed me to the bathroom. 

We were lucky, nobody was in there except us, so we ducked into a stall. There was some even more fucked-up smell than usual, but I ignored it and took his face in my hands, put my mouth on his mouth again. Those curvy soft lips of his, those gulps of breath when I let him go. I moved a little faster now, because I knew our private time was limited. I reached down between us and rubbed my hand over his hard-on, and he titled his head back and groaned. He said my name, “Carla - ” all breathy and turned on - and I was gone. In that moment, I was ready to do anything for him, risk getting caught, whatever.

Another stupid thing about prison jumpsuits is how hard it is to get inside them. You have to unbutton the whole shirt part and pull it down. By design, they’re about as annoying, and as sexy, as those awful footie pajamas they put little kids in. But I was efficient about it and got the top undone and around his waist good and quick, shucked the pants down just far enough that I could reach in his prison-issued tightie-whiteys and get his cock out.

I’ll admit it was… A nice cock. A really nice cock. I won’t say anything more about that.

As I stroked him, he seemed transported. He ran both his hands over his face and through his hair, bit down on a thumb and moaned through it, and to my surprise, actually made eye contact with me. I smiled at him. “Yeah?”

“Yeah,” he whispered, nodding. His face was all flushed and he looked a little healthier than he had in a while. 

I was getting ready to get down on my knees and go down on him, but he took hold of my sides to stop me. Okay, maybe he wasn’t quite ready for that step yet, I thought, a little disappointed. But then he was unbuttoning the top of my jumpsuit. I waited impatiently. When he was done, he ran his hands up my ribs through my t-shirt, over my chest and collarbone, up the sides of my neck. He looked at me, held my gaze a good long time, giving me this firm look like _don’t stop me, I’m doing this._

And _he_ went down on his knees in front of me, instead.

I opened my mouth to say any number of things, something smart-ass, or maybe encouraging, or maybe a warning although I don’t know of what – it shouldn’t be a surprise at this point – but I shut it again because right then three guys walked into the bathroom talking loudly. We both knew we had to be dead quiet, and hopefully they would be distracted enough to not notice there were two sets of feet on the ground in our stall. As Elliot pressed soft firm kisses to the front of my crotch, making me squirm with so many mixed feelings, one of the guys started peeing in the urinals while the other two were bickering over some kind of trade. I tried to ignore them but also keep from making a sound while Elliot slid his hand down the dumb, ugly men’s underwear I had no choice about wearing in prison.

Nobody ever touched me there. Not even me, most of the time. I felt weird about it, you know? It wasn’t really me. Someday I hoped to get rid of the thing. Get all that excess trimmed down and re-shaped into a clit and a g-spot, like I’m meant to have. But for now, the whole big dumb thing was still hooked up to my nervous system. And Elliot was touching it. And Elliot wanted to put it in his mouth.

I might have said something to stop him, I might have even walked away from him, but I couldn’t do anything what with the guys in the bathroom outside our stall. I was kind of pinned there as Elliot lowered those pretty lips down and started blowing me. _Oh god,_ I thought at first, _It’s going to be his first cock he’s ever took in his mouth, it’s going to be this big awkward fucking deal, plus he’d not going to know what the fuck he’s doing, here we go._

But he surprised me. He gave absolutely zero signs of not knowing what the fuck he was doing. He seemed to actually very much know what he was doing. Fucking Elliot was a regular pro at eating cock. I will not go into detail (you pervs), but suffice it to say, it felt pretty good. I just closed my eyes and thought about him sucking my clit, licking up and down over my vag I had every right to have, and it’s actually not too hard to sort of transmogrify the sensations in your head. I was on the brink of coming embarrassingly fast. I put one hand on his head to try to warn him. Before I could get any kind of real signal to him, though, he wrapped his thumb and index finger around the base of it, his mouth sinking all the way down to his hand, and a picture came into my head of him putting that finger inside me, in a part I didn’t have yet, and that was it, I lost it, squeezing my eyes shut and holding my breath to keep from making even the littlest sound as I came down his throat.

The guys had left the bathroom sometime in the middle of that; I had missed it what with the rushing sound in my ears. I opened my eyes and let my breath out slowly.

Elliot stood up and looked at me, wiping his mouth on the back of his hand. “Was that good?” he asked in a quiet voice. 

I laughed and couldn’t resist teasing him. “It was terrible.” But he looked so stricken I took him in my arms and kissed his ear. “It was fantastic, you moron. You’re really good at that, you know that?”

He didn’t say anything, but started kissing me on the lips again. I didn’t ask him where he’d picked up his blow job skills. He’d given me enough of his secrets for now.

“See,” I said between kisses, “I knew you wanted me.” I couldn’t help a smirk.

“I never said I didn’t want you,” Elliot said.

I started stroking his cock again, wanting to make him feel that good too. The way pleasure looked on his face, well, it was pretty hot. Halfway through, his knees started to sort of buckle, so I sat him on the toilet and finished him off, catching his come in a wad of toilet paper. His whole body tensed up and convulsing… I still try not to think about how good he looked right then.

I got a little bit of that insecure feeling right afterwards. I guess it’s based on my past experiences about what happens after a guy comes. Like sometimes they treat you different after that, sometimes you never see them again. I wanted to head off that insecurity, so I started to tell Elliot that maybe this was just a one-time thing, that I didn’t care either way. While I was in the middle of that speech, though, suddenly his head snapped around like he heard someone else come in the bathroom. He went all pale and tense and was listening intently. But I hadn’t heard anything. 

“Shut up,” he whispered hoarsely to nobody, and I figured out what was going on.

He got to his feet and pulled his pants back up, and slowly undid the latch on the door of our stall. He started walking around to the stall next to us, muttering again, “Shut up.” He didn’t even seem aware of me following behind him. I almost expected to see someone in there, the person he was talking to. Maybe pointing that imaginary gun on him. 

When he froze, I froze too. I saw him over Elliot’s shoulder. Reynaldo, I mean. Dead. The nail. The fucked-up note.

I am proud that I didn’t scream.

***

I watched Reynaldo’s body burn and thought about how this was the final sign from the universe that I should stay the fuck away from Elliot. I know there isn’t a vengeful god up there smiting us for having the kind of sexual relations He doesn’t like. Even so, it still really puts a damper on your burgeoning new hot affair you just started, when right afterwards you find your pet rat, your best friend, has been brutally murdered.

Elliot watched the cremation from a little ways away. I made him stand back. This was private. This was for me.

***

I needed new friends. That’s what had gotten me into so much trouble in the first place: I was too lonely. So lonely that someone as bad-of-news as Elliot had looked like a good idea.

Charlie was new and he was nice. We found out we had some things in common. I started sitting with him at breakfast once in a while, talking to him. Nothing big. You should’ve seen Elliot froth over with jealousy, though. I could hardly believe it. The first time he noticed me talking to Charlie, he sat there staring at us the whole time, his eyes burning holes into us as he slowly took bites of his food and chewed so hard you could see his jaw muscles straining. It was almost comical if it hadn’t been so hypocritical. I wanted to go over there and scream at him: You got my FUCKING RAT KILLED you MOTHERFUCKER. We are NOT TOGETHER. You DO NOT OWN ME!

Later that day, I was hanging out with Charlie in the library, and Elliot was magically there, too – he totally followed us, it was obvious. He clunked down some heavy books and started flipping through them with angry movements. Eyes still burning into me, but not actually saying anything to us. It was hilarious because I’d read in his journal how when I confronted him that one time in the library, he’d noticed me doing that too – flipping pages angrily but not telling him (at first) what was wrong - and he described it as me being “such a girl.” Well. I guess we can all be girls sometimes.

He could be jealous all he wanted, he could tear all his hair out from jealousy, for all I cared. I mean, it was kind of flattering, I’ll admit. Just more proof how much he liked me. But no matter what, I was not going to try to be with Elliot anymore. I’d been down that road, and it was really and truly over now. I’d gotten him out of my system finally.

Over the next few days, Elliot acted stranger and stranger. The drama-queen way he’d shown his jealousy, like he didn’t realize he was being super obvious, kind of spread into a lot of weird twitchy dramatic behavior, really loud laughter talking to Leon and stuff like that. It didn’t take me long to figure out he was on drugs. Leon confirmed it: he’d got him uppers. Elliot was trying not to sleep, so the-guy-who-shoots-him couldn’t take him over. It worried me a little, but I wasn’t going to say anything to him about it – I still needed space.

And then it was over. I didn’t know what had happened exactly, but I guess Adderall didn’t sit well with him, after all. The jitters and loud laughter were gone. He was back to his normal, quiet self-possessed way of being a drama queen.

One of my last interactions with him was this. He came up to me in the library one day and handed me a copy of The Catcher in the Rye. I had all kinds of smart-ass things to say to that, but I bit them back because he had a really sad, serious expression on his face. If I had learned anything about Elliot, he was about to do some really dumb shit. I’d read that book already, years ago (who hasn’t?), but I took it from him anyway, and thanked him. Again, I was kind of worried about him, but there was nothing I could do. If he wanted to go wreck himself, that was his right. After he walked away, I sighed and cracked the book open. Holden Caulfield’s a whiny little bitch but he did have some smart insights some of the time. Maybe it could stand a second reading.

Over time, I got better at detaching my mind from Elliot. Charlie helped. Elliot being MIA for a while helped. Leon filled me in, that he was doing some computer stuff for Ray, and I knew that was going to lead to something crazy. I did my best to disconnect, though, and not care. You can’t really let yourself care too much about people like Elliot, who refuse to veer off the conveyor belt to self-destruction they are running down. I knew he was going to crash and burn soon. I couldn’t stop him, nobody could stop him. 

I was still glad I had known him for a while. I started thinking about him kind of wistfully, like he was already dead. Someone that had meant something to me in the distant past, who was long gone, who’d never be mine.

Leon got me testosterone-blockers and estrogen. He told me it’d been Elliot’s request, but I already knew. I didn’t dwell too much on the fact that Elliot arranged that for me, and how thoughtful (and presumptuous) that was. I pretended it was just a little “I’m sorry” gift from the same universe that took Reynaldo from me. 

I burned The Catcher in the Rye after I finished it, but I couldn’t stop one last shred of the stupid romantic in me before I did. I tore out one page before I burned it, and I found Elliot later and gave it to him as a thank-you for the book. The scene on that page had reminded me of Elliot’s story about breaking into the zoo at night with his best friend. _Alright, Carla, that’s it,_ I told myself. _No more romantic gestures._ No more Elliot.

In prison, everything is totally boring and the same for weeks, and then suddenly a whole bunch of things will go by in a whirlwind, things that, more often than not, are the wrong kind of exciting. Ray and Lone Star busted; I found out rumors about what Ray’d been doing later. Several of Ray’s thugs all kinds of fucked up, like they’d been jumped by a whole crew with shivs or something. Leon knew something about that but was keeping quiet. Elliot was in the middle of all of this, but I bit down my curiosity, and didn’t ask him any questions: _He’s dead, he’s gone, he’s not for you._

Instead, I just took his journal when he tried to burn it.

I know. It wasn’t fair, it wasn’t nice. He wanted it destroyed, and I went against that. But I told myself I had read almost all of it anyway – it had been like three-quarters full already when he lent it to me to read. Also, he was released shortly after that. I figured I’d probably never see him again. And I figured I would keep it to myself, I’d be the only one to read it and then burn it myself when I was done.

The journal answered some of my questions, but not all of them. 

I delayed burning it a little longer, to read over some parts again. I started thinking more and more that Elliot might have been pretty key in five/nine, actually.

I told myself I was keeping the journal around for that reason. There was stuff in there that could actually be meaningful information about five/nine. A sick part of me thought maybe I could even plea bargain with some of that information. But there wasn’t really enough, I didn’t think, and I didn’t think I could do that to him. Anyway, pretty soon I was released on parole.

Once I was out, I couldn’t kid myself any longer why I still hadn’t burned the thing. I never really had Elliot, would not ever have Elliot, didn’t want to have Elliot. But that journal, that was a little piece of Elliot’s soul, scratched and stamped all over those pages. His trials and tribulations as he came to terms with both his halves. As he came to terms with something he’d done to help this most tremendous crime that had re-shaped our world. It was a piece of him that I could keep, another scrap of a gift the universe had given me to make up for everything.

And at least I had to admit, it made one hell of a story.


End file.
